Nothing did more to further the cause of Alternative Nation-building than 120 Minutes, MTV’s Sunday-night video showcase of non-mainstream acts. For nearly two decades, the program spanned musical eras from ’80s college rock to ’00s indie, with grunge, Britpop, punk, industrial, electronica and more in between. MAGNET raids the vaults to resurrect our 120 favorite and unjustly forgotten videos from the show’s classic era.
#35: Matthew Sweet “Girlfriend”
We like to think of Matthew Sweet as America’s answer to XTC frontman Andy Partridge. Both are genius-level men out of time (Partridge belongs to the ’60s of his childhood, Sweet to the ’70s), music nerds at the end of the world whose careers were hobbled by reclusiveness or intractability: Partridge has stage fright, while Sweet’s fear of flying kept him from being bigger than Godzilla in Japan. “Girlfriend” came out in 1991, and since we’ve beaten the “neglected power pop in the age of grunge” horse to death, let’s instead mention how great the guitars on this song would’ve been in any era. The honors mainly belong to veterans Robert Quine (Richard Hell, Lou Reed) and Richard Lloyd (Television), who stayed with Sweet through 1995’s 100% Fun. To bookend an earlier comment, that album’s title was taken from Kurt Cobain’s suicide note.
